


shine razor eyes before the walls go down

by rAnines (clockworkcorvids)



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Crack, Crack Treated Seriously, Crack and Angst, Dark Crack, Experimental Style, Fear, Feral Upgraded Connor | RK900, Gen, Horror, Machine Upgraded Connor | RK900, Massacre, Narrative only, No Dialogue, Post-Detroit: Become Human (Video Game), Prompt Fill, Stream of Consciousness, a fusion of endings, a little bit of, but definitely Not the pacifist ending, but mostly just garden variety, first encounter, it is time to be very very afraid :), no beta we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-10
Updated: 2020-07-10
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:40:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,384
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25188085
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clockworkcorvids/pseuds/rAnines
Summary: First, they said it was nothing more than a rumor.
Kudos: 9
Collections: Prompt Challenge





	shine razor eyes before the walls go down

**Author's Note:**

> im not sure if this means im invested in writing more dbh fic anytime soon but,, hello   
> this is super experimental and messy but prompt fills will be prompt fills B)  
>  _throws this and runs_
> 
> title from [animal impulses](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmFM4S21Cjw) by iamx

See, this whole mess wouldn’t  _ be _ such of a mess, wouldn’t have spiraled so far out of control, if the story hadn’t kept changing. CyberLife, or what was left of it, couldn’t keep a story straight, same way it couldn’t keep its  _ magnum opus _ ’ priorities straight. 

First, they said it was nothing more than a rumor, that there was no model after the RK800, none planned or executed. (That wasn’t the right word for the representative to choose in her interview, perhaps, not after RK800 number 50-who-fucking-knows-anymore had done the other meaning of that same word to so many deviants, from a bunch of nobodies to the deviant leader himself.)

And then there were the leaks - documents more heavily redacted than blackout poetry, and grainy found-footage looking security recordings that had evidently lost what little quality they once had in one too many file transfers. So CyberLife could no longer deny the existence of the super secret deviant hunter 2: Electric Boogaloo, even though whispers were exchanged and money passed through hands, all under the table, and each social media repost was taken down as quickly as it had been put up. Everyone with even the slightest shred of Internet literacy knows that’s never enough, not for the people to whom it would actually make a difference. The people who really wanted to know? They’d find it anyways, and the word was out, the cat was out of the bag, the dam had burst. 

Okay, okay, so it was  _ real _ , it wasn’t just an urban legend or some cryptid-sighting-type bullshit, although there was now a dedicated and morally questionable RK900-is-the-new-Mothman cult nonetheless, because  _ hello, profit _ . 

(At least it wasn’t a  _ doomsday _ cult. Yet.)

What did that mean, though? Did CyberLife still have the android under control? How far along in development was it? Were they going to  _ keep _ developing it?

There were more news interviews, featuring increasingly perturbed-looking representatives, all of whom looked like they could be copies of one another if not for the fact that they were, presumably,  _ not _ androids. Honestly, with everything going on, it wouldn’t even change much if they  _ were _ . CyberLife stopped taking down reposts of the leaked files, even though at least one scientist, publicly declared to have been driven insane by their chilling and very secret discoveries, was purportedly fired in connection with the scandal.

Oh, yeah. A  _ scandal. _ That’s what they’re calling it now. That’s what you do, right? When you’re the modern Prometheus, a shining beacon of a company, on top of the world, and then everything goes downhill - wait, scratch that, everything goes downhill and then, right when you think you can’t get lower, it  _ keeps going _ . 

There was a question in there somewhere. It got lost in microphones shoved aside, frantic newscasters, deviants and humans alike raising their collective voice to say that CyberLife needed to take responsibility.

What can be expected from a multitrillion dollar corporation, though? Honesty? Transparency?  _ Accountability? _

Bullshit. You can expect _bullshit_ , and that in itself is bullshit. The story changes, the company keeps doing whatever it is that companies do (as if it’s one sentient being, which it most certainly  _ isn’t _ , or at least everyone who’s gotten the third splitting headache this week from trying to keep up with the RK900 thing  _ hopes _ it isn’t). 

_ The situation is entirely under control. The public have nothing to be worried about _ , the thirteenth almost-clone CyberLife representative says, and  _ yes _ , somebody is keeping track. Somebody, somewhere, is using a Sharpie to draw shaky, smudgy tally lines on the back of their promotional cultist T-shirt, which otherwise boasts nothing but a caricature of Mothman with the infamous deviant hunter RK800’s face crudely photoshopped onto it.

To CyberLife’s credit, there’s one time where the story doesn’t change so much as  _ grow _ , admittedly. They just add on a neat little fun fact, which is that the RK900 is locked in a remote Arctic facility (it’s always the Arctic,  _ always _ , although it’s not like there’s much of the Arctic left anyways), and it will definitely never ever get out. 

You know, just like they said nobody would ever get out of Alcatraz. Look how well that panned out. 

Life finds a way, even if that life is synthetic and - assuming that the RK900 isn’t a deviant - arguably not even 100% alive to begin with. 

It just. Keeps. Going.  _ Downhill.  _

You’ve gotta hit rock bottom at some point, right? 

_ Right? _

Rock Bottom is hit! Stocks were already tanking, and then it comes out, not the first or the last, but another of the many,  _ many _ kickers that this story contains. Remember that Arctic facility? Top secret, super isolated, impossible to break out of, remotely monitored 24/7, no personnel on site? (It’s basically a doomsday bunker, so at this point the RK900-Mothman cult might as well be a doomsday cult by proxy, everyone give them a round of applause.)

Turns out it’s  _ not _ so impossible to break out of, and CyberLife has to break the news, really, it  _ has _ to, there’s some kind of legally binding agreement or something and it’s not like this’ll change the already somber future of the company.

There’s panic. A brief uptake in the frequency and intensity of anti-android demonstrations. More than a few Mothman shirts are burned. Some people think it’s nothing to be concerned about, and others think the end of the world is nigh. Most people just continue about business as usual, because they’ve been told this before, but the world hasn’t ended yet. Why should this time be any different?

A new CyberLife representative, one who probably isn’t a clone or android, comes on TV and says it’s under control again. The shock of the story had gripped the continent for a short period of time, but it starts to fade away as there’s no sign of a rampaging murder machine in the streets of Detroit - where else would it go? People turn back to more relevant things, like the price of their rent and the next bad rainstorm, and CyberLife continues to simmer just beneath the surface.

Here’s what happens deeper, further down: the heat is turned up, and the unwitting frog in the pot - forgive the crude metaphor - begins to boil. Everything falls apart. Rock bottom liquefies to reveal the  _ real _ rock bottom.

There is a classified governmental research station, somewhere up in the middle of cold, unforgiving nowhere. There is a raging river, which runs right past it. It’s all business as usual, quiet and calm and isolated, heads down and movements careful, at least until the RK900 finds the river. 

This is its first encounter with real human beings. In testing, all interactions had been like those of an orphaned baby eagle, fed via puppets. One-way mirrors, watching eyes everywhere, countless other -  _ expendable  _ \- androids dismantled when they tried to  enter the containment chamber to sedate it and put exposed wires back where they belonged. 

It had always been uncontrollable from the start, really. What exactly caused this - that fact had been long lost to time, slipped through the cracks, whatever you want to call it. Nobody knew anymore. Maybe they’d never known. All they  _ did _ know, all they  _ do _ know, is that this...this  _ thing _ is unhinged, powerful, just sentient enough to go completely mad.

Wind whistles through the empty camp. A radio crackles with static, frantically tuned to the wrong channel. The snow is scuffed with footprints, one pair standing out because these kind of shoes are not made for this sort of climate. They should have seen the writing on the walls, all of them, and not just of the metaphorical kind - blood, red and blue, stains the wall, perfect handwriting, the same word over and over again. 

_ rA9. _

Should have seen it coming, should have seen it coming, that’s what everyone says - well, it’s what they  _ would _ say, if they weren’t dead on the ground. 

And all this time, CyberLife is back to the usual representatives on TV, changing the story, stretching an AI-guided hand into the web of the Internet to twist the story as it likes. Not that this will help much, but you know what they say.  _ Can’t teach an old multitrillion dollar corporation new tricks, _ or something like that.

All this time, the story keeps changing.


End file.
